Actually, some things will be revealed BACK in time. We’re now doing chapter-break illustrations for each new chapter, including the first one. But how, you ask, can such a thing be possible when the first chapter was already published, coverless?Â BEHOLD.

Start of the second chapter is also a good time to introduce a cast page and an archive page, and we’re all over that, because, frankly, this creative team rocks.

If that’s whetted your curiosity sufficiently, you may want to know that Phil Kahn, the man, will be appearing at PhilCon, the convention (http://www.philcon.org). Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, that joke never gets old, because Phil really is the living embodiment of what a science fiction convention is and should be. He’s like Uncle Sam for nerds.

Oh, and what’s going on in the story?

We decided that while having characters was nice, most of them should probably exist in the same place at the same time at some point.

Well, technically everyone but Best did that in the opening scene of “Five For Fighting,” but you’ve probably figured out that scene was a flashforward. And I don’t mean a flashforward like the one in the TV series Flashforward, where everyone gets a vision of the season finale and gets depressed and/or elated by how melodramatic their lifepaths may turn out to be. It’s more the kind of flashforward where you, the audience, are getting a written guarantee that if you hang around long enough, we will get past all this artsy-fartsy “exposition” and “character development,” and into the gang-asskicking. There’s another flashforward like that at the beginning of this chapter, starting Wednesday.

Guilded Age does not claim ownership of any of the corporate branding that appears in this comic, nor does it claim any affiliation, partnership, or endorsement of any kind. They are used strictly as an artistic choice for the set dressing of the comic.